I'm currently the top hit for Firstname Lastname -- but if you throw in my middle name or initial, I don't show up at all. Surprising considering there are only five people with my first and last name currently alive, one of which shares my middle name. References to dead people with my name tend to show up on the first page.

I just tried my "firstname lastname" search (I have a middle name I'm not using so it's only fair to maximize my chances of being found). The first link is someone with the same names, on Facebook, but not me. He looks like an OK guy, though.The second link is a collection of images (Google Images), one of them being me, but it's a small, old picture.Third link is a news article about someone else, but the last name isn't used as last name there, but the word itself (my lastname is actually a word from the

Yep. If I search for my "firstname lastname", I get nothing about me, but pages and pages of results for some dork who's long dead, and modern bores with sites about that dork. If I search for my "firstname middlename lastname", then I'm actually on the second page of results at Google (and not anywhere in the Bing results). Of course, if the search includes some terms which are specific to me, then it's more successful.

Nah, Dracula is positively obscure in comparison to my namesake. The name is comparable to "Julius Caesar" in recognizability, in that almost all people in almost every culture are quite familiar with it (yes, that includes the average person in Japan and Brazil and Nigeria and Canada etc.). Impolite persons - mostly Westerners - often ask if (i) the name is real[*], or (ii) if I'm related to the long dead one.

[*] This question has actually been asked by more than one incredulous passport inspector!

Kit!How've you been? You know there are still some idiots who think you wrote my plays don't you. Yeah, like you were good enough to write my plays. Of course, the fact that that bloody Bill gets all the credit doesn't make me appreciate his sonnets any more.

Ten years ago if you searched on something like Yahoo I would have been the first hit because I used to write roleplaying games and run seminars about it. But a number of more 'famous' people who actively farm their reputation have come in and flooded me out of the first half dozen pages and I'm fine with that. Among the various other mes, there's a musician, an artist, a politician and a few others.

Obliquely I'm actually findable via the second link on the first page, as it brings up a Linkedin search as t

I get mainly mispellings of my first or last name to find other people or businesses.

The one I though was funny is "court-records-management.com". I have a misdemeanor conviction in Texas (a speeding ticket back before they moved to a points system). I can pay them money to have them remove their page dedicated to a (nearly) 20 year old ticket. $30 to remove it from their site, and $50 to remove it from Google. Now, anyone who googles me might find my ticket I beat 20 years ago, for horror. Yes, I beat it and was convicted. Nobody wins in front of the traffic court. So you take the conviction, appeal, then argue your case at the appeal. I won the appeal. Still is a "conviction" and shows on my record as a conviction with status "disposed".

I didn't realize how much extortion there is out there based on names. And piles of fake social networks with names in it, ancestry sites, and all that. The WWW is 95% scam.

Though I think I'm the only person on the planet with my first/last combo, though many with one letter different. And more with my middle/last as their first/last that show up if I use my "full" name. The results are more mine if I omit my middle.

With full name including middle, no hits. With middle initial, no hits. With just first and last, pages - and none of them me until something like seven or eight pages in with Google (at twenty-five hits results per page.) Wolfram Alpha says there are about 1900 of me as first-last in U.S. For reasons I don't remember I have an account with LinkedIn and I don't readily show up there either.

Searching on user name, that's another story: apart from a guy in France whose last mention or post is from three

Em, forgot to type due to distraction, but yours is one of the more unusual names I've seen; the results you get seem just plain weird. I don't know how you feel about it, but these days I'd guess a bit of anonymity might be a good thing.

No. (See my handle.) That being said, if I search for my fn/ln, I get some 15k hits -- *after* including "linux" to filter out false positives. And most of the hits w/o Linux are still me. This woo worked to my benefit back "in the day" when both Red Hat and VA Linux asked me to participate in their IPOs for no reason I can discern other than being an active member of the community.

Depends on what you are going for. I am glad that I have a unique first/last name combination because a) it allowed me to register the.com domain for it and b) it makes it easy for people to find out more about my story and legal efforts against the Dutch medical system.

If you want to be anonymous, don't go on the internet or never use your real name there:)

I was asking because we have quite a few employees from TH and PH having "porn" in their name (e.g. Supaporn, Wanaporn) and for each of them there are explicit exceptions being set up in the corporate firewall and spam filters.

I found my CV online, with address, and phone number. It is from about 20 years ago. I posted it to a news group, Something or other tech jobs. Everyone did it back then. Of course the identity thieves had not found the internet yet.
I used it as an example to my nephews showing how once something is on the internet it is there forever.

Unfortunately if you have owned a land line that was listed or property {like a home} you end up like me... name address and phone number complete with google map and street view of my house, jump over to the county's web site and you can look the house's tax value for the last 10 years. Stupid public information.. although it does come in handy when purchasing a house {saved me 13k}. The county won't take down the property information, I guess it's cheaper than making everyone request it in hard copy.

I hear that when you get a Silicon Valley job your Google profile is very important. Well, there are lines of work where the exact opposite is true, it has become a struggle NOT to exist and keep your data private.

It used to be that I searched for my name and I was top spot, quite proud of it. I've since wise up. Luckily a huge influx of Facebook idiots have the same name and my results are buried. Some mailing lists posts and computer security research results are particularly pesky.

I hear that when you get a Silicon Valley job your Google profile is very important. Well, there are lines of work where the exact opposite is true, it has become a struggle NOT to exist and keep your data private.

Is that much of a problem if the results about me are under my control? I could easily remove the Linked In profile (2nd result) and my personal website (1st result).

The guy with the same name as me, and the Github username to match, could easily be confused. He even likes the same music. When I first saw that result (about a year ago) I wondered if I'd already registered for Github and forgotten about it.

For some reason, before I was wily enough to know that it was a good idea, I started my posting life on usenet using a nick rather than my real name. Given some of the things I posted over the years, I'm eternally grateful for this.

im the exact opposite. my full name isn't very common, but there's one semi-pro surfer/skateboarder and he takes up all the results. i'm sure it's also partly due to my antisocial tendencies, and almost religious use of false information, such that I don't show up, at all. My wife of course is the exact opposite,using her real name all over the place as if she never learned what anonymity is (granted, she's a singer, so she kinda needs her name out there).

I try to stay quite anonymous on the Internet. But the one thing that I can't avoid are the patents with my name on them. So anyone wanting to dig up some dirt on me could at least find out where I live (or lived) and who I work (or worked) for.

So that is the one thing that prevents me from disappearing from the face of the planet.

What did people do before the Internet? In a scene from a movie about the cartoonist Harvey Pekar, the actor portraying him in American Splendor [youtube.com] (Paul Giamatti) does a 3 minute soliloquy about his name being listed in telephone books more than once and its somewhat disconcerting affects. Apparently, it's a social activity independent of present technology.

If I use my full name, the top result on google is actually me and it's an information site that shows me linked to my mother and sister and the town I live in (but not current address). Paying would probably reveal that info.

If I shorten my first name (Josh) and don't use middle, none of the results are me.

There are a few other people with my name, and now that the internet is more ubiquitous, some of them actually have some meaningful online presence. Since I don't post on Facebook much, the Facebook result that comes up in the first page of Google results is somebody else. Still, though, more than 80% of the first several pages of results on my firstname+lastname are about me. It was more extreme 10 years ago, when there was the small insurance company that got one result, a college football player with a c

My personal site used to come up as the top hit for a Google search for "Steve Foerster" (with quotes). Now it's not there at all, because someone sent Google a DMCA takedown notice. Evidently the WordPress theme I used had an image in it that its designed had cribbed from someone's photobucket account, or something like that. I changed the theme, and one of these days will get around to sending Google a challenge notice. But what a mess -- if the copyright holder had simply told me, which would have ta

It takes some effort to get a "clean" search, because Google tracks your searches and activity, whether or not you are logged in. This results eventually in links pertaining to YOU getting placed higher in the rankings, than they would for other people who search for your name. You might have to use somebody else's computer, or anonymous mode, to get a realistic look at where you come up in search results.

I have a largely unique last name. If I Google firstname lastname, I get two about me on the front page, one bio from my current prime client and a thing I helped write decades ago about connecting modems to hotel telephone lines; then pages and pages about my brother the writer and my father the (late) senior scientist.

I used to be up there in the search results, but not anymore. I've been on the WWW a while and a lot of the top matches for my name used to be random mailing list posts of mine. (And back then we always used nicknames for sites like this one, so no old forum posts are tied to my actual name.) Now there's a prominent politician from Massachusetts with my name and a lawyer in a big city so you have to dig to find me. (And you won't even know I'm me, because another guy with my name works in my field.) And the

One thing you'll find quickly is my wikipedia entry; where you'll find that I died some time ago. If you dig around long enough you might also find that some stupid kid thought it would be funny to use my name on some stupid obscure website where they talk about apple gadgets and goatse.

If I search my name on Google, I get hits from my firm's website. If I search any other search engine, I am nowhere to be found. Google knows my IP address, so they give me pages about myself. If I search Google on my phone using the mobile network, it's all other people with the same name (my phone is not linked to my Google account). Just because Google serves you up as the first hit for your name, don't assume that everyone else is seeing the same results.

Thanks to my parents' decision to go with a hyphenated last name, my full name is (as far as I can tell) globally unique. This is actually a great thing for me, since I'm in academia and it's best if people can just google my name and find papers I've written etc.

If you google for my name , either full or with middle, I am the only one that turns up in America with that name.In europe it is a different story, as my last name is the equivalent of "smith" over there.

Yeah, when I searched for "banan" by itself, Google returned banana bread recipes and a list of people whose surname is Banan. Then, I searched for "banan united states" and got more banana bread recipes.

Finally, I searched for " "Banan" United States " (with quotes around Banan) and up popped Banan Tarr's Facebook page.

Banan, you may be the only person with the given name "Banan" in the entire U.S.!:-)

Ironically, if you knew my last name, you'd probably say you'd never heard it before, yet when I search for "firstname lastname" I get about a million hits, most of whom are not me. There's even a "www.firstname-lastname.com" out there.

It's even worse for my kids. About a month after my youngest son was born, we had to call the hospital for his records, and there was some confusion, because there was another guy with the same name, who was treated there a few months before that.

It's even worse for my kids. About a month after my youngest son was born, we had to call the hospital for his records, and there was some confusion, because there was another guy with the same name, who was treated there a few months before that.

OT, but I took one of the kids into emergency very late one night and couldn't quite remember what the exact date of her birthday was (yes i'm a terrible parent, but she was only 3 and it was very late at night after week of broken sleep! We have 4 kids all with birth dates in the 20's of their birth months so it gets confusing at the best of times). They looked up the details they had and couldn't find her, but eventually found someone at the exact same address with my wife and I as parents and with a birt

though there are four (search engine indexed) people on the planet with my name, the top pages are from my little family website, but which also has my resume. My last four jobs were due to that online resume. so the stinky little website stays.